"Ah, good taste! What a dreadful thing! Taste is the enemy of creativeness."

"An idea is a point of departure and no more. As soon as you elaborate it, it becomes transformed by thought."

"Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don't start measuring her limbs."

"Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life."

"Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions."

"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."

"Disciples be damned. It's not interesting. It's only the masters that matter. Those who create."

"Every act of creation is first an act of destruction."

"Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."

"Every positive value has its price in negative terms... the genius of Einstein leads to Hiroshima."

"Everything you can imagine is real."

"Give me a museum and I'll fill it."

"God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephantand the cat. He has no real style, He just goes on trying other things."

"He can who thinks he can, and he can't who thinks he can't. This is an inexorable, indisputable law."

"I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it."

"I begin with an idea and then it becomes something else."

"I do not seek. I find."

"I don't believe in accidents. There are only encounters in history. There are no accidents."

"I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them."

"I who have been involved with all styles of painting can assure you that the only things that fluctuate are the waves of fashion which carry the snobs and speculators; the number of true connoisseurs remains more or less the same."

"I'd like to live as a poor man with lots of money."

"It is your work in life that is the ultimate seduction."

"It means nothing to me. I have no opinion about it, and I don't care."

"It takes a long time to become young."

"Museums are just a lot of lies, and the people who make art their business are mostly imposters. We have infected the pictures in museums with all our stupidities, all our mistakes, all our poverty of spirit. We have turned them into petty and ridiculous things."

"My mother said to me, "If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope." Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso."

"Never permit a dichotomy to rule your life, a dichotomy in which you hate what you do so you can have pleasure in your spare time. Look for a situation in which your work will give you as much happiness as your spare time."

"Now there is fame! Of all - hunger, misery, the incomprehension by the public - fame is by far the worst. It is the castigation of God by the artist. It is sad. It is true."

"Often while reading a book one feels that the author would have preferred to paint rather than write; one can sense the pleasure he derives from describing a landscape or a person, as if he were painting what he is saying, because deep in his heart he would have preferred to use brushes and colors."

"One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail."

"One must act in painting as in life, directly."

"Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone."

"Others have seen what is and asked why. I have seen what could be and asked why not."

"Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success."

"Painting is just another way of keeping a diary."

"Sculpture is the art of the intelligence."

"Sculpture is the best comment that a painter can make on painting."

"Some painters transform the sun into a yellow spot, others transform a yellow spot into the sun."

"The artist is a receptacle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web."

"The artist is a recepticle for the emotions that come from all over the place: from the sky, from the earth, from a scrap of paper, from a passing shape, from a spider's web."

"The chief enemy of creativity is "good" sense."

"The hidden harmony is better than the obvious."

"The older you get the stronger the wind gets - and it's always in your face."

"The people who make art their business are mostly imposters."

"The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls."

"To finish a work? To finish a picture? What nonsense! To finish it means to be through with it, to kill it, to rid it of its soul, to give it its final blow the coup de grace for the painter as well as for the picture."

"

"We all know that art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth."

"What is a face, really? Its own photo? Its make-up? Or is it a face as painted by such or such painter? That which is in front? Inside? Behind? And the rest? Doesn't everyone look at himself in his own particular way? Deformations simply do not exist."

"What might be taken for a precocious genius is the genius of childhood. When the child grows up, it disappears without a trace. It may happen that this boy will become a real painter some day, or even a great painter. But then he will have to begin everything again, from zero."

"When you start with a portrait and search for a pure form, a clear volume, through successive eliminations, you arrive inevitably at the egg. Likewise, starting with the egg and following the same process in reverse, one finishes with the portrait."

"Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint."